tellingpeople

A lot of presentation skills trainers will tell you that you should be able to control your nerves and ‘overcome’ them. Personally, I think that’s rubbish and what you should do is ‘use’ them. Why? Because the fear (which is what nerves are, really) kicks off your fight-or-flight reflex and stimulates your body to produce a fistful of hormones.

You’ve probably heard of one of them – adrenaline; you might even have heard of it’s companion – nor-adrenaline; the one we want is the third one – cortisol.

Think of cortisol as like adrenaline for the brain…. and you can imagine how many ways that can be useful in a presentation! The idea isn’t to get rid of the nerves, just to deal with them.

Not being nervous will all too often result in “not being interesting”. We like performance nerves: nerves are good. It’s just too much of ‘em that’s a bad thing…..

So how do you handle the adrenaline rush without losing the cortisol effect? Easier said than done. There are dozens of possible solutions scattered all over the web (and even this blog!); the best of them all, of course is to get your breathing under control.  Diaphragmatic breathing (breathing with your gut, not your chest) will help to release the sleep/sex/feelgood hormones which counter the adrenaline you experience as part of your fight-or-flight syndrome.

Of course, it’s easier said than done, but if you can remember to breath deeply (or breathing low, as I say elsewhere) you’re in with a fighting chance.

OMG.  With the best will in the world, I can’t see this as an overall good thing.

At it’s best, PowerPoint is a fair-to-middling tool, woefully often mis-used, and giving people more gadgets is going to result in more really, really bad presentations.  That’s not to say there aren’t positive uses too, just that my experience I’d risk a bet that more often than not it all ends in tears…..

Oh, no… wait….. that’ll be more work for me as a presentations trainer! Ah, I take it back…. it’s a good thing! 

More  seriously, if you’re tempted to get into this kind of gadget/gimmick add-ons to your PowerPoints, remember to ask yourself if you really, really need it.  If not, it’s just a vanity on your part and a distraction on the audience’s.   Besides, you still need to have a really good recording voice to get things worth listening to…..

I’ve sat through some drivel, recently. Some of it was witty and entertaining at the time, but still drivel. Why? Because it didn’t tell me anything I wanted to know.

I’m sure this scenario is familiar to you – you give up hours of your time to hear about X, Y & Z. The publicity for the event promises that you’ll learn answers to specific questions to do with X, Y & Z: you go with high hopes and perhaps even a note-pad…

… only for the presenter to tell you “something” about X, Y & Z but not the specific questions you were expecting to hear about. You leave, annoyed at the end of the event.

Why do people do that? Because they make the mistake of presenting from their perspective, not their audiences. They know about X, Y & Z so they talk about X, Y & Z – forgetting that what’s imprtant to them isn’t important, automatically, important to the audience.

Let me give you a specific example. The presenter was the front man for a large Quango, the first-point-of-contact-and-one-stop-shop for a particular service. Fantastic! Great! Just what I needed…….! except that for the full 20 minutes of his presentation he never once told us how we could contact his organisation.

No website, no phone number, nothing!

Frankly, I didn’t care about how his organisation was being re-organised, I wanted to know how to get in touch with him.

Today’s tip is basic! Ask yourself this critical question before you start to design or write your presentation: “what do my audience need to know?” It’s not rocket science!

And if you think I might mean you, I probably do. Give me a call and I’ll do you a discount on some presentation skills training!

Someone asked me recently for a simple formula for structuring their presentation.

Now, I’m always hesitant about giving out simple formulae – because they’re generally over-simple and don’t take into account the circumstances of the presentation etc.. This brings with it the risk of a presentation be totally in-appropriate and backfiring……    on the other hand, so long as the presenter understands the limits of any simple aphorism, it can be a lot more useful than telling them to do “what’s appropriate at the time”!

Thus was born the idea of a presentation structure along the lines of Define, Discuss & Decide

• Define the problem – what are you there for? What is it that brings you and your audience together? (I mean the issues here, not such things as the office politics.) If there aren’t clear answers to this kind of question, go your separate ways without wasting any more of each other’s time!

• Discuss the issues once you’ve defined them. Don’t discuss anything you don’t need to discuss and don’t miss out anything germane to the Definition, either. There are lots of ways of doing this, such as the Disney (Dreamer, Engineer Critic) approach and they’re covered in zillions of places all over the web.

• Decide what the outcomes are. Relate your discussion back to your Definition. If you needed a decision, check you’ve got one: if you needed to disseminate information, check your audience have received it.  In other words, “decide” is just code for “decide to stop talking” 

Okay, I admit it’s a bit contrived, but there are a lot worse structures out there! Remember, a simplification like this isn’t a substitute for doing the necessary prep for your presentation but it might just save you if you ever find yourself ambushed and having to wing it. Structure in improvisations is always useful!

I’ve never heard of this before, but I read here that eating bananas wil help deal with presentation nerves.  I can’t for the life of me figure why it might work, but if it does, who am I argue!?!?

Actually, the other ideas on the page are pretty sensible, so there might be something to this one, too.  Anyone tried it?  Did it work?  Anyone know why it might work?

Regular readers will know I’m not a fan of PowerPoint for two reasons.

• It’s often badly used; and
• It’s designed in a way to make it too easy to use it badly.

I know I’m not alone in this, and recently another voice has joined in – namely Prof John Sweller, from Australia. You can see a report of his thoughts here: basically he points out that because of the way our brains are hardwired it’s easy to overload them with too much information. This is particularly a problem if we’re receiving lots of the same kind of information. A PowerPoint slide containing words runs a serious risk of doing just that.

A Powerpoint slide with a diagramme has a much better chance of getting through to your audience……

The key concept is that our brains work with a two-tier memory system – short and long term. We absorb them in the former but to remember things we need to transfer them to the latter. Generally our short-term memory can handle no more than seven things at a time. If we’re spending too much time/energy trying to keep tabs on what we’re hearing and seeing we’ve got no energy left to pass things back to our long-term memory. If that doesn’t happen there’s not much point in us having got the info in the first place as we won’t remember it past the end of the presentation…….